This invention relates to a technology of correlating data item names among a plurality of data schemas.
A recent rise in business-to-business (BtoB) services based on the Internet has led to progresses in international standardization and industry standardization to enhance interoperability of information/services among companies. For example, an industry standard XML/EDI of electronic business XML (ebXML) specifications has become mainstream for electronic data interchange (EDI), an extensible business reporting language (XBRL) has become mainstream for financial information, and thus it is necessary to correlate data items described according to each company's own specifications with items of standard specifications. For correlation tools, there are some tools for interconversion between various original format files and EDI standard format files. However, for all the tools, a correlation of data items among formats of a plurality of databases must be defined manually by using a GUI. This leads to a problem that it takes time and labor to deal with changes such as new introduction of a database system or an information retrieval system, or upgrade to an industry standard, and bedsides, know-how of mapping item names tends to be accumulated merely at an individual level.
As a conventional art regarding the correlation of the data item names, there has been known a method of using a dictionary or an ontology (containing relations among terms used for specification description) that are prepared beforehand. For example, JP 08-249338 A discloses a method of breaking down a data item name into “adjunct+headword+division word” by using a dictionary, and calculating a similarity of data item names based on whether or not each element is found in the dictionary.
JP 2003-345821 A discloses as the information retrieval system a method of describing hierarchical relations or synonymous relations among concepts in an ontology, and generating proximate retrieval conditions by using the ontology.
JP 2005-157823 A discloses a technology of fetching an electronic document and outputting data indicating a conceptual relation between two morphemes.